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Attack on Democratic rights at Visva-Bharati University

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Rabindranath Tagore founded Visva-Bharati as an institution of learning in 1921 in a district named Birbhum in the southern part of the present day West Bengal, arguably using a part of his Nobel Prize award money. He gave the name Visva-Bharati very consciously which meant a communion of the world with India and he wanted to create an education system opposing the colonial education system. Tagore wanted his students’ view of society to be informed by internationalism, humanism and universal brotherhood. He viewed the traditional school, bounded by its four walls and weighed down by a rigid curriculum, as a prison. At Bolpur-Shantiniketan Visva-Bharati campus, classes are held in open air. The idea is to be close to nature, where students could define their boundaries of knowledge.

After independence, in 1951 i.e. exactly a decade after Tagore’s demise it was converted into a central University with the Prime Minister as its Chancellor. The university is divided into institutes, centres, departments and schools, spread over a large part of the University city of Bolpur in Birbhum district.

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Some thoughts on the ongoing debate around the tragic demise of Darshan Solanki

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Amit Singh, Research and teaching worker, IIT Bombay

The recent death of the first year dalit undergraduate student, Darshan Solanki, has once again raised the question of the caste discrimination and related biases on the IITB campus. The institutions and support system that the Institute has built over the years in order to deal with the mental stress and the caste related discrimination have rightly come under the scanner. The Student Wellness Centre (SWC), whose mandate is to provide counselling to the students who are facing or having “academic concerns, social (family and peer) pressure etc, leading to feelings of loneliness, low confidence, anxiety, stress, anger and sadness, to name a few,” has not been able to achieve much of its goals. The center does not have wide reach among the student community. And when last year the concerned students pointed out anti-reservation views expressed in a social media post by the In-charge of the SWC and demanded her removal, the Institute did not listen to the demand, except privately reprimanding her following which she deleted her post. The demand to increase dalit-adivasi-bahujan psychologists and counsellors in the SWC was also not given any importance. Similarly, the SC/ST Students Cell which aims to address “academic and non-academic issues and complaints received from the students belonging to the SC and ST communities” has been found to be lacking in its mandate.

Read More »Some thoughts on the ongoing debate around the tragic demise of Darshan Solanki